Sunday, September 24, 2006

Has anyone seen, read, heard of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? There's a character that helps to decode the languages of non-English speaking aliens, called the "Babelfish." It's a sort of instant translator that works by receiving the electric brainwaves from the mind of the speaker and translating them into English. No problem, right? Sounds great! But...would it work? Thinking about Saussure, Sapir, Barthes, Austin, and even Foucault, at how we use language to understand each other. What episteme do martians who hyper-warped into our universe from year 5872 belong to?

Friday, September 15, 2006

Has it ever struck anyone as odd that the 3-wheeled vehicle used by the Berkeley Police Dep't is called the "Interceptor"? And that that name is so prominently written, in white on the black bumper area of the car? It seems at odds with the usual phrases that are visible on police vehicles that try to appeal to the public, mitigating any notion of 'encorcement': "Serving our community," "To protect and to serve," etc. Only rarely do the catchy names that are given to vehicles--Explorer, Legend, Ranger, Sonata, Armada, you name it (!)--have anything to do with what purpose the vehicle actually serves. But there it is: "Interceptor," the actual social and political function of the vehicle highlighted all the more by its rather wimpy 3-wheel stature, which couldn't possibly intercept on a road full of SUVs, trucks, etc. Why should it seem striking, though, that a name should actually state what a vehicle does, or at least one version of it? This example directs my attention back to all the other 'normal' car names, product names that then seem to be nothing if not empty signifiers, partially at least loaded with mythological meaning, made banal by their profusion but constantly draining the life out of language. Too Barthesian?

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Here's one example of how to go about the myth activity for section. One thing I've noticed as I've been trying to tune in to myth around us is how the movie "World Trade Center" and other media on 9/11 often use silhouettes of the Twin Towers as iconic representations of the entire tragedy. And when I saw the San Francisco Chronicle "Datebook" section from August 9, I was surprised that the towers and the sky behind them were allowed to cover up even part of the word "Datebook," dominating the layout of the page:

Clearly these rectangular forms are doing important work for symbolizing the events and stories and all that has come to be associated with the thing called "9/11" (this would be another term good to analyze by the way!). So I scratched my head and tried to think about what the first order signifier and signified are, what the sign they produce is, how that sign then is used (coopted, taken, stolen, borrowed, or the like) as a signifier to be paired with a new signified. Then, in this second order, we should have a myth that uses an 'everyday' sign for a purpose quite different than was originally intended...

(Click on the image to enlarge)

The image on this newspaper cover is complex, with words, images, colors, layout, and other variables all playing a part, and there's no 'one' meaning. So the analysis above is something of a simplification, since I'm only focusing on the rectangular shapes and not Michael Pena and Nicholas Cage's identity as police officers, their upcast eyes, the silhouettes of two people walking between the 'towers', etc. I'll be interested to hear your reactions...have you seen any other examples of '9/11' represented with two iconic towers, meaning something more than just a few buildings? Has your mental image of J.R.R. Tolkien's book (and movie) "The Two Towers" changed at all, the linguistic signifer "two towers" started to be pulled at by myth?

Friday, September 08, 2006

Eastern Michigan University has a website and listserv that goes out to a lot of people in the academic community interested in linguistics and related fields. I added their link to the list at right. Here's a listing from yesterday that caught my eye, related to what we've been talking about in class recently (and yesterday's video)

-------------------------Title: The Spiral of 'Anti-Other Rhetoric' Subtitle: Discourses of identity and the international media echo Series Title: Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 22 http://www.benjamins.com/

Book URL: http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=DAPSAC%2022

How do media inform our representations of the Other and how does this influence intercultural / international relations? While officially dialogues between different national societies are conducted by diplomats in bilateral and multilateral settings, in practice journalists also participate every day in such dialogues through the phenomenon of the "international media echo" in which they report on each others' societies. Until now, media have only been investigated for their potential role in the foreign policy of specific states. In a case study involving media in three national cultures and languages (French, American and Russian), this book presents an interdisciplinary framework that combines quantitative and qualitative analyses for the study of the international media echo in an intercultural / international relations perspective. In particular, the fundamental functioning of "spirals of anti-Other rhetoric", i.e. media wars, is examined in a Critical Discourse Analysis approach completed with Social Identity Theory and International Relations theories.

Table of contents

Foreword xi-xii Chapter 1. Media, international relations, collective memories, and critical discourse analysis 1-16 Chapter 2. National and international contexts for the international media echo 17-52 Chapter 3. Russia in Le Monde and The New York Times 53-105 Chapter 4. Le Monde's and The New York Times' editorials in their national societies 107-128 Chapter 5. Russian reactions to the West 129-160 Chapter 6. Crossing cultural and disciplinary boundaries 161-181 Appendices 183-243 Notes 245-267 References 269-277 Index 279-280

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

It looks like this story came out on the same day that Claire discussed the "Shibboleth test" in lecture. Sapir is one of the first people to point out the 'socializing' function of language, and the passage on p.17 seems helpful: "The extraordinary importance of minute linguistic differences for the symbolization of psychologically real as contrasted with politically or sociologically official groups is intuitively felt by most people. 'He talks like us' is equivalent to saying 'He is one of us.'"

In last semester's Language & Power class, Tim McNamara, from the University of Melbourne, came and lectured to class one day. (The article we read: McNamara, Tim. 21st century shibboleth: Language tests, identity and intergroup conflict. In Language Policy 4:4, 2005, 1-17). His argument was basically what was summarized by Claire yesterday--that not only are differences in pronunciation (what one group might consider consequential phonemic difference, and another group not recognize at all, or only as slight phonetic difference) used to decide who is in and who is out of a particular social group, but that such immediate judgments may be used to banish, torture, or kill, and indeed have been in multiple settings and in multiple eras.

This article though was startling to me because it argues that it's not even what we say, but our very names that can be used for similar purposes. On one hand it seems to relate somehow to our everyday experiences, where someone's name (read or heard) might trigger ideas or associations about ethnic group 'membership', for example, but to take this to the next level and say that it is one's name alone that can be the significant factor in life-or-death experiences....overwhelming.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Here are a few articles about a recent incident in which someone ready to board a JetBlue flight in New York was asked to remove his t-shirt because it had writing in Arabic on it, and some other passengers were 'concerned' about it:

This passage from the second (MSNBC) article especially caught my eye: "One official told him, 'Going to an airport with a T-shirt in Arabic script is like going to a bank and wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘I’m a robber,”' he said.

Of course this raises lots of questions, like, is freedom of (clothing) expression also subject to censorship, search and removal on the airlines and in public space now? What is the power of words, or, just the shape of words, to mean something totally unrelated from what the 'content' of those words means?

I have a strong visceral reaction to the story, but it's helpful to think about it in terms of the theory we're studying in Language and Power: How would Saussure explain what's going on? How about Sapir? If the shirt is bilingual in Arabic and English, and 'says the same thing,' then we might assume when we think in Saussure's terms that the signified is the same (though the idea of "value" shows us that it's not just what the words mean in themselves, but what they mean in contrast and copresence with all the other words that can be said in that language). And there are two different signifiers--in the case of English, the phrase "We will not be silent".

But the fact that the Arabic script itself was 'read' in a very different way, the fact that it elicited fear and discomfort among a group of people who didn't know 'what it said' suggests that Saussure's model (or at least the 5 pages that we've read!) doesn't do everything we need it to. Sapir's idea of the referential and expressive functions of language may be going in the right direction. the passage about the 4+ things that language does besides serve as a channel for communication is helpful. And we'll want to look at Barthes' idea of myth, and, coming up for next week, Austin's speech act, expanded on later by Butler. Language doesn't just describe things; it does things, and what is done (social effects, etc.) by what we say and what we wear can't always be predicted...